Danny Boyle's tautly imagined `28 Days Later' is an ambitious zombie film more plausible than supernatural, more hysterical than scary, and more raw than gory.

Rating: 8/10 (1 July 2003)

Danny Boyle's tautly imagined `28 Days Later' is an ambitious zombie film more plausible than supernatural, more hysterical than scary, and more raw than gory. Although the film is being marketed as a horror film, it bares truer resemblance to thrillers like `Outbreak,' based on the terrifying non-fiction, `Crisis in the Hotzone.' Unlike George Romero's genre-defining visions of `Night, Dawn and Day of the (Living) Dead' trilogy, D. Boyle's zombies are not dead but rather terminally enraged. Clearly the makers were inspired more by `Crisis in the Hotzone,' especially the way Ebola virus spread, and applied it in a zombie film. (In the final stages of Ebola infection, contaminated blood pours out from every orifices of victims' bodies while causing them to thrash violently and infect others through eyes, mouth, open wound and some even through air.)
Wonderfully transparent Cillian Murphy plays Jim, a bicycle messenger who fell into coma just before the outbreak, wakes up to find all of London empty and left to discover the terrible fate of humanity. Embracing the limited budget and digital video, D. Boyle champions inspired collaboration from his talented cast and cameraman, Anthony Dod Mantle. Christopher Eccleston's insane Major Henry West and Brendan Gleeson's tenderly father Frank are excellent, and DV photography helps shape the film's creepy mood as well as freer application of digital visual effects. John Murphy's aggressive score highlights film's implicit violence and psychological turmoil occurring throughout the film. While `28 Days Later' is not as scary as G. Romero's Dead Trilogy, D. Boyle succeeds in breathing fresh life to the living-dead genre. This one rates 8/10.